Not really hub related but advice on how to monitor internet speed

[aaiyar]

@marktheknife

But the speedtest node seems to have download speeds consistently ~200-300 mbps less than what I see when running a test from speedtest.net in a chrome window on the same PC that's running my node red server.

Yup same here. Zero difference when I have Node-RED running on a NUC 7. There's a 50 mbps difference when I have it running on an Odroid N2.

[marktheknife]

Weird, I'm using a NUC as well, it's got an 8th gen i5 CPU, seems like that shouldn't be a limiting factor? I guess I could try to keep track of whether it's approximately a consistent speed below the web speedtest throughput, and adjust my cutoff point for the node red flow accordingly.

Anyway, thanks again for clueing us into the speedtest node!

[steelz1]

I have a total NOOB questions (since i'm 2 weeks new lol). what is this "flow" view? Thank you. Don't be too hard on me LOL

[marktheknife]

It's not a part of Hubitat per se, it's Node-RED, a very powerful tool for tying together a ton of IoT and other LAN/WAN connected devices, servers, APIs etc. It's possible to integrate Hubitat with node-red in various ways, there are a lot of forum threads that delve into the details.

https://nodered.org/

[steelz1]

fantastic.. thanks for sharing the info!!!

[aaiyar]

@steelz1

fantastic

If you decide to go down that wormhole, the minimal additional hardware you'll need is a Raspberry Pi.

As @marktheknife said, there are multiple threads on the forum, but here's a couple good ones to start with:

Node-RED nodes for hubitat

I want to share with you my recent development with Hubitat and Node-RED. node-red-contrib-hubitat It is some generic nodes to facilitate the integration with Hubitat. The challenge was to found the middle between generic and easy of use. I will be very happy to have your feedbacks and discuss about how to improve it Note that I keep this post updated with every release, no need to read all posts to know new features or changes. You can look at the CHANGELOG for news How t…

Node-Red Palette: Common Choices

I'm opening this topic to ask if there's any reason to create a List of Modules for one's first installation of Node-Red. I ask because it seems there's a few new users to NR every few days and the Flows that are being shared often use a Palette item not on everyone's installation. Must Have: node-red-contrib-hubitat (Node-RED to Hubitat communication) node-red-node-rbe (continue down flow only if a value changes) node-red-contrib-noop (Simple placeholder node to help visualizations) Palett…

[marktheknife]

@aaiyar

Raspberry Pi.

Or a docker container running on a NAS, or it can run natively on Windows .

[aaiyar]

@marktheknife

I've been using a modified version this sequence for a couple days. The output is pasted above.

https://flows.nodered.org/flow/e3e8c7f4807f383ab85d61ff2dfda208

[marktheknife]

Wow, this looks cool.

I'm still pretty dumb when it comes to node-red though. Can I simply remove that "call speedtest cli" node and substitute it with the node-red-contrib-speedtest node?

[aaiyar]

I haven't tried that. But you can install speedtest-cli with (apt-get install speedtest) - assuming you have something based off Debian on your NUC8.

Edit: That won't work. However, it can be done by modifying the sequence - replacing the function node with a bunch of change nodes and the exec node (call speedtest-cli) with the speedtest node. I won't get a chance to post it today, but I'll try to get it done tomorrow.

[marktheknife]

thanks! Looking forward to trying that out whenever you get a chance. I just tried removing the call speedtest-cli exec node and putting the speedtest node in its place. Definitely didn't work.

[aaiyar]

@marktheknife

I got impatient. Here you go - you can import this sequence and it should work like the previous one, except it uses the speedtest node. Before you import it, you will have to install the simpletime node (if you don't have it):

node-red-contrib-simpletime

Speed test sequence with speedtest node

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[marktheknife]

I’m gonna try it out in a min.

[marktheknife]

hmm, I'm seeing an error in the debug console from the "speedtest data restore" nodes:

"Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'C:\Windows\system32\speedtestData.json'"

[marktheknife]

And then after the flow tried to execute (looks like the speedtest node itself was working), errors from the "speedtest data save" nodes:

"failed to write to file: Error: EPERM: operation not permitted, open 'C:\Windows\system32\speedtestData.json'"

Edit: I'm not sure if I need to point the restore and save nodes to a different path so they don't default to that Windows directory? Or maybe check the "create directory if it doesn't exist" option to allow the save nodes to create those json files?

[aaiyar]

@marktheknife

C:\Windows\system32\speedtestData.json

I don't use Windows, but I know what's going on, and it is fixable. The sequence needs to create two files:

speedtestData.json
speedtestDataPD.json

On Windows, it is trying to create this in a directory that Node-RED doesn't have write permissions for (C:\Windows\system32).

To fix it, you need to open the two file nodes and the two file-in nodes (i.e, these four)

and change

speedtestData.json
speedtestDataPD.json

to something like:

C:\mark_directory\home\desktop

(Whatever your home directory is. You can put the files on your Desktop for example).

And then it will work for sure.

[marktheknife]

sweet thanks, kinda what I was thinking; point it to a full file path so it doesn't try to create the files by default
that turns out to be someplace that it shouldn't be doing that (from the OS' perspective, that is).

[marktheknife]

Success!

Out of curiosity, how did you choose 120,000 ms as the speedtest node's MaxTime?

[aaiyar]

@marktheknife

how did you choose 120,000 ms as the speedtest node's MaxTime

By experimentation. Over 2 minutes doesn't change the value of the download/upload speeds much (I mean statistical distribution about a mean). And under a minute caused a lot of variation. This was with my Cox cable internet.

So it might be different for other providers. Worth checking out, I guess.

[marktheknife]

Thanks, maybe by playing around with that value I can get it closer to the download speeds I see when running from a browser.